


sell my soul (for a bit more time)

by crankipli3r



Series: Who Kidnapped Markiplier? [1]
Category: CrankGameplays - Fandom, Video Blogging RPF, markiplier - Fandom
Genre: First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Love Confessions, M/M, Mentions of Cancer, PAX East 2018, Torture, i'm only mean to mark bc he's my favorite i'm so sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-02-04 11:47:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18603907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crankipli3r/pseuds/crankipli3r
Summary: In Mark’s opinion, no other con will ever be able to surpass PAX.It’s hard to remember why he loves it so much, however, when he’s just been drugged with something from a syringe and is now in the back of a van, pulling away from the convention center.------Instead of having dinner with Ethan after his first solo panel at PAX East, Mark ends up being abducted by a pair of psychopaths with a problem they think only Mark can solve. Ethan and the rest of his friends have less than six hours to find him, or a combination of external injuries and ethanol injections may kill him. On top of that, they have to cope with Mark's torture being livestreamed under the guise of charity.





	sell my soul (for a bit more time)

**Author's Note:**

> hello everyone! this is my first crankiplier fic and it's completely self-indulgent so i apologize in advance for the whump and everything. hopefully you read the warnings and the tags so you're somewhat aware of what lies ahead.
> 
> a couple liberties i took with this story simply bc it's self-indulgent and i altered certain things for both the story's sake and bc i wanted to:
> 
> \- the boston convention center where PAX East is held doesn't have a parking garage.  
> \- mark had a solo panel at PAX in 2018, but i included his buddies on the panel for the story's sake.  
> \- i have no idea what a stream like this would look like in the real world as far as website hosting, or what an actual federal investigation into a situation like this would look like, so the investigation i depict in this story is most likely wildly inaccurate. sorry to the FBI agent monitoring my keystrokes.  
> \- jack is mentioned a total of two (2) times in this fic simply because i realized part way through it that i'd forgotten about him. but i didn't go back to include him because i personally don't ship septiplier or really watch any of jack's content. idk why, i just don't. self-indulgent, remember?
> 
> one more thing: the title comes from "11 Minutes" by yungblood, halsey, and travis barker. 
> 
> i hope someone other than me reads this and isn't horrified by it. enjoy! :)

PAX. When he thinks back on the memories he’s made at this convention over the years with friends and fans alike, Mark can’t help but rank it as his favorite. He loves the mission, the atmosphere, the city. There’s just something about the energy of every person in the building that keeps him ramped up and hungry for more throughout all four days.

Perhaps most significantly, this is the convention that brought him Ethan. And Mark still holds that in his heart as the best thing to come out of any con he’s ever attended — even topping the con at which he met Sean in person for the first time. That meeting would’ve happened inevitably one way or the other, but meeting Ethan three years ago at PAX East 2015 was pure chance. In Mark’s opinion, no other con will ever be able to surpass PAX simply for that reason.

It’s hard to remember why he loves it so much, however, when he’s just been drugged with something from a syringe and is now in the back of a van, pulling away from the convention center.

“Where’re you taking me?” Mark slurs, head swimming and limbs heavy. He’s jostled to one side of the van as it takes a corner too sharply, and he grunts softly as the back of his head slams into the door.

“Shut the fuck up,” says a sinister voice from somewhere just beyond the blackened edge of Mark’s fuzzy vision. It’s followed by a loud crackling noise, a flash of blue light, and a sudden, searing pain shooting through Mark’s abdomen. He screams, muscles seizing as electricity rockets through his body.

The wave passes after a few long seconds. Panting, Mark tries to sit up and reach for the source of the voice and the pain. He knows if it weren’t for the drugs in his system, he could probably take down at least one of his captors. “P-Please, I — why’re you doin’ this?” he manages to say before a firm hand shoves him back to the floor of the van.

A blurry face hovers above Mark’s now, only it’s mostly covered by a ski mask. “You’ll find out soon enough, you fuck,” the person spits, applying more pressure to the center of Mark’s chest with their hand. “Now stay down.”

Gasping for breath, Mark reaches up to swipe at the person’s face with an uncoordinated fist. He’s punished with another taser to the stomach, making him convulse and cry out brokenly. The inside of his mouth tastes like iron now.

“I’ll give you wha’ever y’ want,” he says, fighting the black curtain of unconsciousness that’s threatening to fall over him. “Money, tech, merch — ”

_"Merch?”_

Mark’s head snaps to the side with the force of the punch to his left cheekbone. He lets out a soft pained sound, more surprised than anything, and squeezes his eyes shut.

“You think we went through all this fucking trouble — tracked you down to your fucking parking space — because we want your shitty merchandise?” The dark figure digs their nails into Mark’s chest and jabs the taser into his side this time, eliciting another agonized shriek. “God, your ego is bigger than I thought.”

“J-Jus’ tell me w-what you want,” Mark chokes out, trembling, as tears begin to escape from behind his heavy eyelids.  “I … I’ll do it, I … ”

“What I _want,”_ the masked figure says in a growl, pulling Mark up off the floor by the collar of his flannel, “is for you to _shut the fuck up_ for the rest of the fucking drive.”

With one more fist to the face, Mark’s world goes completely black.

 

* * *

 

_Mark can’t help but admire Ethan’s radiant smile as they giggle together onstage, now best friends instead of idol-and-fan. Bob, Wade, and Tyler are rolling their eyes at whatever inside joke they’ve been excluded from, but Mark hardly notices as he watches Ethan throw his head back with mirth and draw his knees up to his chest as he laughs his heart out. He looks older without the acne and the blue hair, but Mark is reminded of just how young he still is as he watches the younger man’s face light up._

_“Dude, don’t pull anything,” he chuckles, clapping Ethan on the shoulder. “I didn’t think I was that funny.”_

_Ethan just shakes his head and swipes a stray tear away from his eye as he gets his breathing under control, still beaming at Mark. “Shut up, you’re always funny,” he says, elbowing Mark in the side._

_“God, get a room already!” Bob exclaims good-naturedly from the other end of the couch, and the crowd cheers. Mark just blushes, and to his confused delight, so does Ethan._

_“You know where mine is,” Mark says, waggling his eyebrows exaggeratedly. He reaches out and runs his fingertips from Ethan’s hip to his knee, grazing his thigh suggestively as they both shake with silent laughter._

_“I sure do, big boy,” Ethan replies, lacing their fingers together for a few seconds as the crowd loses its collective mind. “Wait for me.”_

_“I will.”_

_It’s all a gaff and everyone knows it, but Mark can’t help the way his heart flutters at the glint in Ethan’s blue eyes._

 

* * *

 

Instead of waking up in a soft bed curled around a warm, cuddly boy, Mark slowly opens his non-swollen eye and finds himself in a cold, windowless room. There’s only a few rickety wooden chairs scattered around the small space, one of which Mark is tied to. He blinks as his vision adjusts to the dim light and tests the strength of the rope around his wrists and ankles — it’s too tight to even attempt at escaping.

Alarmingly, as he flexes the fingers of his right hand he feels a dull, vaguely familiar stinging sensation and looks down. His eyes widen as he realizes there’s an IV injection port in the back of his hand, inserted and taped down somewhat professionally though there’s already a massive bruise spreading from the point of entry. Mark can only hope the needle was sterilized before his captors stuck it in his vein.

Looking around, Mark shivers and takes in every detail about the room he can when he can only open one eye and he’s missing his glasses: The floor and walls are made of concrete, it seems, with only a few dim light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The room is probably 15 feet by 15 feet, with a wooden staircase across from Mark leading up to a pair of cellar doors. In a far dark corner, he can make out the blurry shape of a table with different … _instruments_ on it, and his stomach flips.

 _What the fuck do they want from me?_ he thinks, trying to remember every hate comment he’s gotten on recent videos to see if any stand out. _Is this a nightmare? Did I play a game like this recently and fall asleep at my monitor again? Fuck, I hope Ethan doesn’t think I —_

Mark’s growing panic attack is interrupted by the lock on the cellar doors rattling, and he holds his breath as they swing open. Two pairs of booted feet stomp down the stairs and slowly emerge from the shadows, revealing all black clothing and ski masks still in place. Mark just stares in petrified silence as the kidnappers approach him, shivering harder and gripping the arms of the chair so hard his fingers go numb.

“So,” says the slightly taller one, crossing his arms across his broad chest. “Mister High-And-Mighty Markiplier, reduced to a frightened child.” Mark recognizes the voice and knows this is the man who’d tasered him in the back of the van. Worryingly, he sees his partner is now holding the device.

Swallowing hard and licking his dry lips, Mark says in a raspy voice he barely recognizes as his own, “I-I’m not afraid of you.”

“Really?” Taller takes three steps closer to Mark’s chair and leans down over him, staring unblinkingly into his eyes. “I don’t believe you.”

Mark holds his gaze, but he can’t help but flinch as the man grabs his jaw with a gloved hand and squeezes. Taller smirks. “Thought so.”

Mark just swallows again and manages to say, “What do you want from me? I already told you I’d do anything.” God, he hopes he’ll finally get a straight answer.

Taller stares at Mark for a few more seconds before finally releasing his jaw and stepping back. “I guess I can tell you now, just so we can get the show on the road,” he muses. Turning to his partner, he nods wordlessly and the other man walks over to the table, beginning to gather supplies. Surprisingly, the first thing he begins to assemble appears to be a tripod.

“It’s no secret you’ve got a worldwide audience, Fischbach,” Taller says, beginning to pace back and forth in front of Mark. “And you’ve managed to raise millions of dollars by appealing to that audience’s better nature. While I could delve into the moral implications of manipulating naive teenagers and their families into donating to causes they know nothing about besides what you’ve told them, I won’t, because we’re about to depend on that naivete. Now —”

But Mark can’t stay silent. “H-Hold on, wait, I — I’ve never knowingly lied about any of the organizations I’ve done streams for,” he insists. “And I’ve never _manipulated_ my subscribers into donating, _never,_ I — _aagh!”_

Mark hadn’t even noticed Shorter approaching the chair again with the completed tripod — and the taser. But before he knows it, his self-defense rambling is cut short by millions of volts coursing through his already battered body. He convulses in the chair and squeezes his eyes shut as he screams through his teeth.

“Are you fucking finished?” Taller asks, sounding bored, once his partner takes the taser away from Mark’s side. Mark can barely hear him over the buzzing in his ears and his own labored breathing. “Good. As I was saying, you’ve got a wide sphere of influence and millions of impressionable fans who’d do whatever you told them to do without questioning it for a second. That’s kind of what we’re counting on.

“You’ve probably realized by now that I’m the only one that’s talking. That’s because my partner — who happens to be my brother — has advanced stage laryngeal cancer, which is both slowly killing him and diminishing his voice. His treatments are becoming pretty much impossible for us to afford, because to put it bluntly, we’re shit broke. And since we’re not a big charity organization or a famous YouTuber, we haven’t been able to get the word of our need out effectively enough. And that’s where you come in.

“We could just force you to hand over some of your own money and let you go. But not only does that limit us to your individual resources, it’s also a lot less fun than what we have planned. Instead, you’re gonna do a special surprise charity livestream and raise one million dollars in six hours.”

“That’s impossible,” Mark says, shaking his head and speaking past the horror he feels at the mere prospect of what this man is saying. “The most I’ve ever raised is half a million in twenty four hours. Y-You can’t — twice that in a quarter of the time is just impossible.”

“For your sake, you’d better hope you’re wrong,” Taller says. “‘Cuz you’re not just raising money to save my brother’s life — it’s to save your own life, too.”

As if revealing a precious stone, the captor pulls a syringe full of a clear liquid out of the pocket of his hoodie and holds it up in front of Mark’s nose. “Know what’s in here?” he asks, grinning so wide his sharp canines are visible. There’s no mirth in his eyes, though, only cold, empty evil. “Go on, ask.”

When Mark keeps his jaw clamped defiantly shut, Quiet steps forward and punishes him with a fist to his already bruised cheekbone.

“I said _ask me what’s in the syringe,_ you egotistical fuck.”

“W-What’s in the syringe?”

“It’s a little concoction we’ve made that’s gonna be injected into your IV every hour we don’t meet the goal,” Taller replies matter-of-factly, flicking the needle like it’s a toy. “It’s mostly saline, but it also contains half an ounce of pure ethanol.”

Mark’s entire body grows cold as the first wave of real, actual terror and fear for his life washes over him. He doesn’t even need to listen to the rest of the explanation to know what it’ll be: “Everyone with an internet connection knows about your little _problem_ with alcohol. Even half an ounce of it injected directly into your bloodstream isn’t gonna feel great. By the time you’ve got two ounces in you, will your heart even still be beating?”

“You can’t do this,” Mark chokes out, watching in disbelief as Quiet finishes setting up a camera on the nearby tripod and opens up a laptop. “You can’t fucking … _torture_ me on a livestream. YouTube will take the video down before it gets a thousand viewers once someone reports it —”

“That’s why we’re not hosting it on YouTube.” Taller carefully places the syringe on a small metal table that his brother places beside Mark’s chair. The table also contains the taser, muscle stimulators, a pair of surgical scissors, and a distressingly large knife. “We’ve hacked all your accounts, Mark. We’re going to post a link to the stream and the donation page on your Twitter, and maybe post a quick text video to your channel to really grab people’s attention. And before you ask, our IP address is untraceable — even if someone _could_ trace it, they’d end up with an address somewhere in Azerbaijan.”

There’s a long, uneasy silence full of Mark’s heavy, panicked breathing as the two kidnappers get the camera positioned correctly and hooked up to the laptop. Mark watches in an almost detached manner as Quiet sets himself up on a cushioned wooden chair with the laptop and Taller gets a stack of what appear to be cue cards from the table in the far corner.

“Now there’s a few rules besides the timing of the ethanol injections,” Taller says eventually, taking his place right behind the tripod. “Every ten thousand dollars donated earns you a drink of water. Every hundred thousand earns you a small sandwich. If you deviate from the script on these cue cards in the slightest, you’ll be punished how we see fit. If we reach the goal before the six hours is up, you’ll be released. If we don’t, you’ll probably die from the build-up of poison in your system from the ethanol and we’ll still get to keep the donations, so it’s a win-win scenario, really.”

“People are gonna figure it out,” Mark says, trying his hardest not to let them hear the fear in his voice. “You’re fucking stupid if you think they’re gonna believe I’m doing this of my own free will.”

Taller just laughs, and Quiet gives a hoarse chuckle of his own. “Oh, Markimoo,” the captor mocks, reaching out to run his fingers through Mark’s greasy hair. He tugs sharply, and Mark can’t help the whimper that forces its way out of his ravaged throat.

“We’re counting on that.”

* * *

 

 

_Mark knows exactly when his crush on Ethan first bloomed. It definitely wasn’t when they first met — the kid had only been 16 at the time, eager and bright-eyed and desperate for the chance to just say hi to him. No, as mesmerizing as that first backflip had been, Mark certainly hasn’t been attracted to a goddamn teenaged fan like a creep._

_By the time they were working together as best friends, Ethan was 18 and his hair was blue and he still idolized Mark in some respects but they were much closer to equals. Mark still wasn’t attracted to him, though he sometimes got the sense Ethan felt some kind of way towards him. He ignored it, though, chalking it up to residual idol worship and electing to continue hanging all over the younger boy and making “Team Purple” jokes any chance he got. Ethan never objected or made any indication that it bothered him, so Mark figured it was alright._

_The crush finally happened last year, during the You’re Welcome Tour. Naturally. The dance routine, the sweet words Ethan would say about Mark after every show, the way they got to know each other so much better by sharing a bus for two months … It strengthened the relationships of everyone on the tour, but especially the one between Mark and Ethan. Out of everyone, they’d known each other for the shortest period of time, and after the tour it finally felt like that didn’t matter._

_Also after the tour, Mark couldn’t help but think about the way Ethan could move his hips, the look in his eyes when he was staring Mark down from the other side of the stage or an inch away, the stifled sounds he made late at night on the bus when he was trying to get off and thought no one could hear him …_

_Mark had a feeling he was a goner after the June leg. But after October, it was clear there was no going back._

_Breaking up with Amy right before PAX East this year was the most painful thing Mark had ever done, but when she told him she’d known for awhile as she held his shaking form, he knew he’d done the right thing._

_Mark had planned to take Ethan out to dinner tonight to celebrate after his first solo panel. He’d rehearsed a romantic speech and even organized to have flowers delivered to Ethan’s hotel room later if everything went well. It was going to be the beginning of the rest of their lives, the beginning of something new and exciting and beautiful._

_But as he’d been walking to his rental car in the parking garage with a skip in his step and an excited flutter in his chest, Mark had been pinned to a concrete support beam and pierced in the neck with a syringe full of a fast-acting drug. Even as he’d tried to fight his attackers off while they dragged his weakening body to an unmarked black van, his last sane thought was of Ethan._

 

* * *

 

Ethan’s starting to get discouraged. He’s been sitting alone at a table for two at Morton’s Steakhouse for 45 minutes now, waiting for Mark to show up. His friend had wanted to treat him as a congratulations for his first solo panel at PAX East, and from the way he’d put it, it had almost sounded like a date. Ethan had happily agreed, grinning probably too wide, and Mark had looked so elated Ethan hadn’t been able to resist wrapping the older man in a warm hug.

There’s almost nowhere in the world Ethan feels safer than in Mark’s strong arms. He hadn’t wanted to let go, but he’d had to leave to get ready for his panel and Mark had fans to meet and panels he wanted to see himself … They’d never be able to stay entwined forever, sadly.

God, but he’d been looking forward to this dinner. He’s been enraptured with Mark since he only knew the public YouTube image of him, and now that he’s known the real Mark for more than two years, his adoration has only gotten deeper. And since the You’re Welcome Tour, Ethan’s sensed Mark might feel differently towards him, too. As devastated as he was to learn he and Amy had broken up, a sick part of Ethan had been excited when he’d realized he had a chance now.

When Mark had asked if Ethan wanted to go to dinner after his panel, Ethan had asked who else would be coming. Blushing, Mark had explained it would just be the two of them.

“I just wanna treat you, y’know?” he’d said, his deep brown eyes shining with pride and something like nervous hope. “It’s a big deal, it’s your first panel, and I wanted to spend some quality time with you. It’s okay if you’re busy or something, or if you wanna fly home for a few days —”

“Oh my god, Mark, shut up,” Ethan had chuckled, heart already skipping beats. “Yes, dinner sounds great.”

So they’d agreed to meet at Morton’s at seven, and it’s almost eight and the waiter’s asked Ethan if he’s still expecting his “date” twice now. Sighing heavily, Ethan shakes his head and buries his face in his hands, debating whether or not to try calling Mark again. He hadn’t picked up the last three times Ethan’s tried, and he hasn’t been answering texts for about two hours now, which is very unlike him. Ethan’s chalked it up to normal con business up until now, but he’s about done being patient.

As if on cue, his phone buzzes. Rolling his eyes, Ethan mutters, _“Finally,_ you dick,” and picks it up.

But it’s not a text. It’s a notification from Mark’s channel, saying he’s just posted a video. It’s titled “SURPRISE CHARITY LIVESTREAM FOR CANCER PATIENT!”, and Ethan frowns. _What the fuck?_ Not only is eight p.m. EST an awful time to start a charity stream, but Mark hasn’t ever mentioned doing one along these lines. Usually his streams are for organizations, not for individual people.

Deeply perplexed, Ethan taps on the notification. It directs him to a video on Mark’s channel — a thirty-second, non-monetized video that’s just white Helvetica text on a black background. All it says is, “Surprise! Check the links in the description to donate or head to the stream!”

 _What the FUCK?_ Ethan’s stomach churns — something doesn’t feel right at all. This doesn’t look like anything Mark’s posted or organized before, and the stream link is to a host site Ethan’s never heard of. Biting his lip, he taps on it and waits as the page it redirects to loads.

It’s a very plain website, white text on a black background. The stream hasn’t started yet; there’s no chat feature, but there is a countdown timer with 14 seconds left on it in the middle of the page. Ethan’s heart is pounding as he watches the numbers slowly reach zero, and the video window opens.

The image that fills the screen of his phone almost makes Ethan pass out. He chokes out a horrified noise and claps a hand over his mouth when he remembers he’s in a restaurant, his eyes glued to the screen. He cranks the volume up as high as he can so he can hear everything that’s happening without having to hold the phone to his ear.

Mark is on screen, tied to a wooden chair with a harsh light shining on his pale, sweat- and tear-streaked face. His left cheekbone and eye are bruised and swollen, and his lower lip is split and bleeding. His flannel shirt is unbuttoned, revealing small taser burns marring his skin and muscle stimulator electrodes on his pecs and stomach. There’s an IV just visible on the bottom of the frame in his right hand, his hair is a mess, and he looks more scared than Ethan’s ever seen him. When he speaks, his voice is wrecked and it’s obvious he’s reading a script.

“H-Hello, everybody, my name is Markiplier, and welcome to my surprise charity livestream for a cancer patient,” he begins, sounding defiant but still close to tears. There’s no inflection in his voice, no cheerful tone; it’s as though all emotion has been drained from him. “You might notice this isn’t my recording studio. You are right. I’m at a f-friend’s house. I’m raising m-money for that friend because he’s been diagnosed with laryngeal cancer and can’t afford his treatment anymore. Because of this, he’s … kindly asked me to help him.

“Th-This won’t be a normal charity stream. I won’t play video games. I won’t laugh with my friends. There won’t be fun challenges. Instead, all I am going to do is sit here and … and w-wait for the money to roll in. Every ten thousand dollars earns me a drink of water. Every hundred thousand dollars gets me food. A-And every hundred and fifty thousand d-dollars gets the muscle stimulators on my chest and abs turned down. Our goal is — is — one m-million dollars in six hours.”

Ethan’s head is spinning. He can feel the confused stares of other restaurant patrons on the back of his neck, but he doesn’t care. Tears are streaming down his cheeks and his hands shake as he scrambles to stand up and grab his jacket from the back of his chair, still watching and listening to get as much information as he can. He ignores two calls from Tyler and Bob as Mark continues to speak in a haunted tone.

“There are a few more fun twists in store,” Mark intones, staring into the camera with dead eyes. “For every hour we don’t reach the goal of one million dollars, my f-friend will inject half an ounce of pure ethanol into the IV in my hand.”

Ethan almost throws up on the sidewalk outside the steakhouse because he _knows_ what that means, and he can’t comprehend the evil of it. On his phone screen, two tears finally trail down Mark’s face.

“As you may know, I can’t p-process alcohol. If I have enough of it, it t-turns to poison in my body and I h-have a transient ischemic attack, which is similar to a h-heart attack or a stroke. This means that even though w-we have six hours to reach our goal, if we don’t reach it in f-four, I m-might already be unconscious or — or d-dead.”

With that, Mark’s good eye closes and he lets out a few choked, heartbreaking sobs. Ethan can hardly remain standing, and he stumbles into a nearby alley so he can get out of the public eye when his knees give out and he collapses against a brick wall.

He actually lets out a short, horrified scream when a gloved hand reaches into the frame holding a crackling taser and shoves it into Mark’s bare stomach. Thankfully, the audio setup is amateur at best, so the taser is loud enough to mostly drown out Mark’s agonized bellowing. But it doesn’t hide the way his body convulses or the way his face twists in anguish as he cries out and begs for whoever is hurting him to _please stop, please, I’m sorry, I’ll keep going, stop stop stop please stop_

Ethan swallows back another wave of nausea and shakes his head in disbelief. The taser finally disappears from the frame and Mark is left panting and crying quietly, trembling so hard the chair he’s tied to is rattling with it. He swallows hard and manages to continue reading his unseen script.

“D-Don’t bother alerting law enforcement about this. They won’t find me. This stream is untraceable. The donation link is anonymous. Though you see me, I am lost. Th-The only way I get out of this alive is if I raise one million dollars from my — my naive, gullible, b-blindly loyal fanbase in six hours or less. That is my ransom. There is a donation limit of t-two thousand dollars per donor to keep things interesting. The clock behind me will count down, starting now — _a-aahagh!”_

Someone off screen must’ve turned on the muscle stimulators, because Mark instantly goes tense and doubles over in pain. His cries quickly devolve into weak sobs, and as much as Ethan wants to keep an eye on him to make sure he’s still alive and not being hurt worse, he has to call Tyler.

The older man picks up on the first ring. “Oh my god,” he breathes out in lieu of a greeting, sounding angry and afraid and close to tears himself.

Ethan just cries into the phone for a minute, trying to form a sentence in response. When he finally can, he says, “What do we do? We don’t know where he is, they’re _hurting_ him, h-he could be in a different fucking _state_ by now, Tyler, oh god —”

“First we need to calm down,” Tyler says, voice unsteady but calm. “We — We can’t lose our heads, ‘cuz that’s just gonna make everything worse. You need to get back here to the hotel.”

“I’m headed there now,” Ethan says, forcing himself up off the ground in the filthy alley and stumbling back onto the sidewalk. “I-I dunno if I’m gonna be able to drive in a straight line, but —”

“I’ll get you an Uber,” Tyler says, and Ethan feels a wave of gratitude so strong he could almost pass out from it. “You’re at that steakhouse, right?”

“Yeah. Mark wanted to celebrate my first solo panel.” Ethan bites his lip as more tears well up in his eyes. “I … I think it was s-supposed to be a date, too. Tyler, fuck, if he — if that fucking evil _fuck_ got him when he was on his way here, it would be my —”

“If you finish that sentence, I’m gonna fucking hit you the second I see you,” Tyler growls. “Uber’s four minutes away. Black Toyota Camry, license plate starts with Y47.”

“Thank you.” Ethan swipes at his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt and sniffles into the phone. “God, is this a nightmare?”

“I wish it was.” Tyler sighs and Ethan can practically see him running his hand through his curly hair. “Bob and Wade and I have the stream up just so we can — just to make sure he’s — and it’s on mute now. He’s not reading anything else right now. Just … twitching from the stims.”

“He looked so tired,” Ethan whispers, images of Mark’s pale, clammy face flashing unbidden in his mind. “We need to save him.”

“We will,” Tyler says as Ethan’s Uber pulls up twenty feet away. “I promise. There’s no other option.”

Ethan climbs into the black Camry, thankful his driver doesn’t seem like the chatty type. He fastens his seat belt and huddles in the back seat, curled up as small as he can make himself. “Don’t hang up.”

“I’m not going anywhere. App says you’ll be here in six minutes.”

Ethan closes his eyes and listens to Tyler breathe into the phone for the entire ride.

 

* * *

 

Whenever Mark’s used his muscle stimulators, it’s always been in a joking manner. He knows how to use them so they hurt, but don’t cause lasting damage. He’s also never jumped right in at the highest setting — he knows working your way up is important, so the muscle doesn’t get too tense and the skin doesn’t burn.

His captors don’t seem to know about these safety precautions — or if they do, they don’t give a shit. Mark can feel and almost smell his skin burning, can hardly sit upright in the chair from how tense his abs are. His pecs are buzzing and they _ache,_ like something’s already torn from over-exertion, and he can’t help the pathetic whines and cries that break free of his dry lips every few seconds.

Frustratingly, his captors have remained completely silent since the stream started. Now, however, Taller hits a button on the camera that must be a mute and says with a disappointed frown, “We’ve only gotten twenty-five hundred bucks in twenty minutes, even with thirty-five thousand people watching. I think you can do better, O Great and Talented Markiplier. Time for some more reading.”

Mark shakes his head, but doesn’t say anything. He can hardly think past the pain he’s in right now, and he can’t imagine speaking through it.

“Oh, no, you don’t call the shots down here. We do.” Taller walks over to the far table and chooses another stack of cue cards while Quiet adjusts the camera so Mark’s more centered in the frame despite being hunched over. “Now make sure you read these nice and clearly — we wouldn’t want to have to use that shiny knife.”

Mark blinks the overwhelmed tears out of his eyes, looking up and squinting slightly so he can see the cards. When the words are mostly in focus and the camera’s been un-muted, he licks his lips and starts reading.

“Y-You stingy motherfuckers,” he begins, hating himself immediately. “How dare you withhold money from a man with a d-deadly disease. In case you d-don’t recall, I am raising money for my friend with acute l-laryngeal cancer. He n-eeds the money for treatment or doctors say he will die within four months.

“Th-This cancer is aggressive and life-altering. My f-friend’s symptoms include coughing blood, trouble s-swallowing, trouble breathing, s-swollen lymph nodes, a-and a near-complete loss of voice. If you don’t donate, you will not only kill me, y-you will kill him too.

“To d-demonstrate just how miserable life with this disease is, my — ”

Mark’s voice dies in his throat and he looks at his captors in a panic, not wanting to believe what he sees written on the card. Taller just motions impatiently for him to keep reading, a warning in his dark, cold eyes. Mark sobs once, helplessly, _angrily,_ and continues, forcing words out past his tears.

“ … My f-friend will drag the tip of a sharp knife d-down my chest very slowly. The s-screaming — the screaming will m-make my throat hurt and my voice hoarse, a-and the b-blood will symbolize the blood my friend coughs up every d-day. Grab — G-Grab your popcorn. And your wallets.”

As soon as Mark reads the last word, Taller drops the cue cards and motions to Quiet, who stands up from his char and hands over the laptop. Carefully keeping most of his body out of frame, Quiet makes his way to the table beside Mark’s chair and picks up the knife, twirling it so it glints in the glow of the single cheap light shining on Mark.

“F-Fuck you,” Mark growls breathlessly, looking up and meeting Quiet’s eyes. He’s in agony, but he refuses to let 35,000 people see him take this without a fight.

Quiet, naturally, doesn’t respond. He just grips Mark’s shoulder and forces him to sit up straight in the chair, stretching his tensed muscles in a way they shouldn’t be stretched. Mark bites back a howl of pain and squeezes his eyes shut.

When he cracks them open again, he sees Taller has written something new on the back of one of the cue cards: “THEY BETTER HEAR YOU.” Immediately, Mark resolves to do everything he can to not make a sound through this ordeal. He knows by now his friends and family must be among the 35,000 audience members, and he doesn’t want them to see him sink any lower.

Mark thinks of his mom and his brother, both probably terrified beyond belief by what they’re seeing. He thinks of Amy and Kathryn, holding each other in their apartment and crying quietly as they watch him writhe. He thinks of Bob, of Wade, of Tyler, of Ethan.

 _Ethan,_ who must’ve thought at first he’d been stood up at the steakhouse. _Ethan,_ whose beautiful blue eyes are probably shining with tears right now. _Ethan,_ who is probably moving heaven and earth to try and figure out how to find Mark and rescue him from this hell.

No matter what happens in this cellar in the next five and a half hours, Mark will make sure there is enough of him left for Ethan to find.

He’s abruptly pulled out of his thoughts by a sharp, burning pain searing through his left pec as Quiet jabs the tip of the knife into his flesh. A choked cry of pain escapes Mark’s mouth, but he quickly clamps his jaw shut and stares into the camera defiantly. He imagines he’s looking at Ethan, trying to picture the younger man in front of him and focusing on that mental image with all his concentration.

Then Quiet presses the knife in a few millimeters deeper and drags it down an inch. The pain triples, but Mark breathes out harshly through his clenches teeth as he keeps his gaze fixed on the camera lens.

Taller writes another note: “YOU WILL SCREAM. CAN’T HOLD IT IN FOREVER.”

Mark shakes his head and grips the armrests of the chair so tight he feels splinters dig into his fingertips. He jolts almost violently as the knife slips down another two inches, empty stomach roiling at the feeling of hot blood running down his bruised skin, but he just bites his lip and stays silent. His entire body is shaking now, but at least he hasn’t made a sound.

Taller watches, slowly becoming more enraged, as Quiet carves a line further and further down Mark’s torso. Mark manages to keep his jaw locked shut and even though there’s tears streaming down his cheeks by the time the cut is six inches long, he’s morbidly proud of himself for maintaining some composure.

Four inches and incredible amounts of misery later, Mark is sure his captors are about to give up. He’s beaten them, at least in this test, and he hopes they realize now what kind of person they’re dealing with. Idly, Mark’s exhausted, pain-addled brain wonders if his dad would be proud of him.

But then he sees Taller and Quiet share a look. Taller is clearly furious, and when Quiet mouths something to him, he agrees immediately before fixing Mark with an insidious glare. Mark doesn’t even have time to completely process the exchange before the five-inch knife blade sinks completely into his side.

He hopes his dad can forgive him for screaming at that.

 

* * *

 

Bob slams the laptop shut and swears at the top of his voice as Tyler and Wade bolt to the bathroom and Ethan sprints to the kitchen. The sounds of retching and sobbing fill the hotel room as the four friends try to process what they’ve just witnessed.

When he’s completely emptied the contents of his stomach into the steel sink, Ethan collapses to his knees on the tile floor and starts to hyperventilate. “Tyler, Tyler, T-Tyler —”

The older man is at Ethan’s side in seconds, gathering him up in his arms and holding him tight. Ethan clings to him and they both sob, panicky and angry and utterly petrified with fear.

“D-Did they just kill him,” Ethan chokes out between heaving breaths, more a statement than a question. “D-D-Did we just watch him die, oh my god, Tyler, he can’t be —”

“That guy needs him for the rest of the stream,” Tyler says in a trembling voice as Wade and Bob join them on the kitchen floor. “He’s n-not gonna — as awful as it sounds, he’s gotta be kept alive for at least the length of the stream. Otherwise it’s pointless.”

“I-I love him,” Ethan sobs without realizing, without _caring,_ because every Mark-related emotion he’s ever felt is manifesting right now and that one happens to be the strongest. “He can’t die b-before I tell him, I was gonna tell him, oh _fuck.”_

Tyler makes a pained noise in the back of his throat and holds Ethan tighter, nodding. “I know,” he whispers. Wade nods, too, tears rolling down his cheeks in rivers as he rubs Ethan’s back with a shaking hand. Bob just scrubs a hand across his own face and sighs like he’s certain he’ll wake up from this nightmare any second.

Just then, sirens sound in the near distance and Wade swipes his tears away with the back of his hand. “Cops are here. FBI, too, hopefully,” he announces, forcing himself up off the floor. “Bob and I called them about five minutes into the stream. They should have some of their signal tracing equipment, and they’ll check the security cameras around the outside of the convention center.”

“We told them everything we knew and they’ve been watching the stream since we called,” Bob chimes in, standing up himself. “Hopefully they saw … the last part.”

“You can bring them up here if they need to talk to us,” Tyler says, still trying to soothe Ethan with soft words and touches. Wade and Bob nod solemnly before heading out of the room to meet the officers and agents in the downstairs lobby.

It takes Ethan a few more minutes to be able to speak coherently again. “I need to see him,” he whispers, sniffling and slowly pulling away from Tyler’s chest. “I — I gotta make sure he’s okay. Please.”

Tyler nods and helps Ethan up. They both stumble back to the living area of the hotel room and settle heavily on the couch. Tyler puts the laptop on the coffee table and opens it, unlocking it with trembling fingers.

The stream page loads slowly, but when it’s finally up Ethan feels like being sick all over again.

Mark is tied to the chair still, though he’s slouched sideways and much paler than before. The muscle stim electrodes are gone, but there’s burns and bruises mottling the skin where they were and a bloody gash running down his chest. Most noticeable is a blood-soaked towel haphazardly duct taped to his left side to “bandage” the knife wound. He appears to only be half-conscious and when he opens his mouth to speak, his voice is the most hoarse it’s been since the stream started.

“Almost ten thousand dollars raised in forty-five minutes,” Mark rasps, soft and a little slurred. “Not fast enough. I’m d-disappointed in you. Where’s your compassion? Not only have you deprived me of food an’ water, but y-you’re depriving my friend of medical care. Should be ashhhamed of yourselves.”

“He’s in shock,” Tyler observes in horror, and Ethan just stares. “The good news is he probably can’t feel any pain right now.”

“In fifteen minutes the guy’s gonna give him ethanol,” Ethan says, shivering at the thought. “He’s gonna fucking pass out. What if he tries to hurt him to make him stay awake?”

Tyler gulps. “He might be banking on people donating when they see Mark knocked out, because they’ll wanna save him more.”

“Donations didn’t go up that much when he got fucking _stabbed,”_ Ethan points out, nearly hysterical. “I think people aren’t donating because they don’t wanna support a fucking psychopath. Which, for once in my life, I’m gonna say is unfortunate.”

Tyler just shakes his head in mortified silence and watches his friend continue to speak on the laptop screen. Mark is saying something about the ethanol, which makes him start to tremble a little harder than he already was, and Ethan’s heart breaks for the thousandth time in an hour.

“ … of a transient ischemic attack include s-slurred speech, confusion, numbness on one side of the body, irregular heartbeat, a-and eventual loss of c-consciousness,” Mark says, looking helplessly afraid. All the fight that had been in him before appears to be gone. “M-My heart eventually won’t be able to get enough blood to my brain. And considering I’ve now l-lost a significant amount of blood already, the effects may be w-worse. I —”

Something in Mark’s face chances suddenly, and a gloved hand brings a glass of water into frame. When Ethan flips over to the donation page for a moment, he sees it’s finally surpassed $10,000. On the stream, Mark eagerly gulps down a few mouthfuls of water before the glass is taken away and he’s left panting, eyes closed likes he’s just tasted the best food in the universe.

A thought strikes Ethan, and his throat closes. “He’s gonna die anyway,” he murmurs, eyes fixed on Mark’s pallid, sweaty face.

Tyler’s head snaps around to look at him. “You don’t know that,” he snaps, but there’s a note of fear in his voice.

Ethan only nods, watching Mark fight off a wave of pain. “They’re starving him, dehydrating him, poisoning him, and bleeding him like a stuck pig. No one could survive six hours of that. I … we gotta find him soon.”

“We will,” says Wade’s voice, and Tyler and Ethan turn around to see him and Bob entering the room with three FBI agents. One of the agents appears to have the stream up on a phone, while the other has it playing on a heavy-duty laptop with some kind of cartridge attached to it.

“Hello, gentlemen,” one of the agents says, offering a hand to shake. Ethan and Tyler stand on shaky legs to accept it. “I’m Agent Henry, and these are Agents O’Brynne and Moore. We’ve been following the video stream closely ever since your friends tipped us off to it, and we assure you we’re doing everything in our power to find Mr. Fischbach as quickly as we can.”

“Mark,” Ethan says, wrapping his arms around himself and looking at each of the agents in turn as they eye him. “Please call him Mark.”

Agent Henry nods in understanding, offering Ethan a surprisingly compassionate smile. “Mark. We’re doing everything we can to find Mark as soon as possible.”

“They’re giving him the first ethanol shot,” says Agent O’Brynne, eyes fixed to the laptop. She pulls a long antenna out of the cartridge attached to the back of the monitor, but Ethan barely notices as he scrambles over to watch, his three friends close beside him.

On screen, the camera zooms in on Mark’s shaking, bruised, slightly bloody right hand. The familiar gloved fingers bring a syringe into frame and flip open the valve of the IV port. Without much circumstance, the syringe is emptied into the IV and the camera zooms out — just in time to see Mark recoiling and crying out from the burn. A few seconds later, his jaw goes lax and his good eye glazes over as the alcohol seeps into his system.

“That guy’s killing him,” Tyler says needlessly. “He’s _fucking_ killing him on video in front of his fans and us.”

“Actually, we believe there are two individuals with him,” Agent Moore chimes in, looking up from her tablet. “We noticed that the height and hand size of the gloved man has varied slightly. One man administered the taser and gave him the water, but a slightly smaller man used the knife and the syringe. Once we find the right security camera footage, that theory should be confirmed.”

It’s helpful information, but it all sounds so clinical and unreal. Ethan looks away from the laptop and hides his face in Bob’s shoulder, wishing he and Mark were flirting over entrees at Morton’s Steakhouse. They would’ve been almost ready to head back to the hotel by now, smiling and laughing and too giddy to care about anything else but each other. Would Mark have wanted to walk back as an excuse to hold Ethan’s hand? Would Ethan have been able to focus on anything besides Mark’s dazzling smile? Would one of them have had the courage to duck into a stairwell or a quiet hallway in the hotel and finally, _finally_ release years of built-up tension with a slow kiss?

Ethan’s cried so much in the last hour he doesn’t even notice he’s doing it again until he feels Bob’s warm arms wrap tightly around him. He can vaguely hear Wade saying he’ll call Mark’s mom and Agent Henry telling everyone else the police officers are downstairs going through security camera footage, but his heart and his head hurt too much to absorb the information. He just clings to Bob and tries to stay conscious amidst the overwhelming flood of emotions he’s fighting against.

It’s another ten minutes before Ethan’s able to tune back into the ongoing conversation around him. He, Bob, and Tyler are now sitting on the couch, and he scrubs the tears out of his eyes as Agent Moore continues to speak.

“ … the HIPAA Compliance Officers at local hospitals to get lists of all their male patients with laryngeal cancer. Based on the height and weight demographics from those lists, we can narrow our search further,” she explains. “These men might seem like criminal masterminds on the surface, but revealing a specific diagnosis like that only makes them easier to track down.”

“What happens after that?” Bob asks, still holding Ethan close to his side. Ethan does his best to focus on the answer.

“Well, honestly, we may not even need this information if they were kind enough to show themselves and their getaway vehicle on the security cameras at the convention center,” Agent Moore explains. “If we get a good image of their license plate, we can more quickly identify the owner. In addition, we may be able to trace their entire route through traffic cameras if we’re lucky.”

Ethan sighs, sitting up a bit. “How long do you think this will take?” he asks, trying to keep the hopelessness and skepticism out of his voice. He doesn’t want the highly-trained FBI Agent to think he’s doubting her. “One hour? Two? Within four Mark could already be dead, and the stream has less than five left. They’re not getting donations fast enough, and they’re gonna blame him and punish him for it however they want.”

“As Agent Henry said before, we’re working as quickly as we can,” Agent Moore replies in a calm voice. “In fact, we’re expecting to hear back from the hospitals within half an hour and the officers should be getting a hit on the security cams any —”

“They found it,” Agent O’Brynne interjects, bursting back into the hotel room from the outside hallway where she’d taken a call with Agent Henry. Ethan, Tyler, and Bob sit up instantly. “On a series of parking garage cameras. Two males dressed head to toe in black, faces covered by ski masks, approximately five-eleven and six-one. The shorter male has what appears to be a mass on his throat, probably the tumor. They drugged the victim with something from a syringe and escaped in a black Dodge van, but there’s no plates.”

“Shit,” Agent Moore mutters, but she still seems hopeful. “We’d better hope the hospitals give us good lists, then. Are the cops tapping into traffic cams next?”

“They already saw which way they turned onto D Street from the garage, so they’re contacting all local stations to do just that. The put out an APB on the van, as well.”

“Hopefully they didn’t go too far off the map. Make sure to keep an eye on … ”

Ethan’s head is spinning from this influx of information, and he closes his eyes against the assault. Bob must notice, because Ethan feels him start rubbing his arm in slow, soothing motions, not unlike what Mark’s done for him in the past to ward off his panic attacks. Despite the friendly gesture, Ethan still feels like he’s been on the verge of one forever.

“Any luck tracing the stream signal with that thing?” Wade asks, probably meaning the antenna cartridge on the back of the laptop. Ethan hopes his call with Mark’s mom went okay.

Ethan opens his eyes as Agent Henry walks over and crouches down beside the coffee table. He types a few things, brings up a complicated-looking window, and shakes his head after a few seconds. “No, unfortunately,” he says, apologetic. “Even though they were dumb enough to get themselves on camera, they’re doing a pretty good job at redirecting their IP address all over the globe. If they were hooked up to an ethernet port, we might be able to trace them through the phone landlines, but they don’t seem to be.”

“What’s happening on the stream now?” Ethan asks in a small voice, wanting to change the subject. All this technical strategy talk seems to have taken the focus off the main priority. “I-Is Mark okay?”

Everyone goes quiet as Agent Henry pulls up the stream page. “Donations are at just over seventeen thousand,” he says. “The timer shows four hours and thirty-six minutes left. Mark appears … lethargic, to say the least.”

Agent O’Brynne’s phone rings and she steps away to answer it while Agent Henry turns the laptop around so the four friends can see. Sure enough, Mark is clearly struggling to stay awake, blinking hard every few seconds to keep his eyes open. His face is already flushing red from the alcohol, despite there being much less blood in his body than usual. His captors appear to have changed the towel bandage already, probably because the first one was soaked through, and there’s an angry red stripe on his skin where they ripped the duct tape off way too fast.

Ethan feels sick and afraid and so in love he begins to shake with it. Staring into Mark’s tiny pixelated eyes, he thinks as hard as he can, _Don’t worry. We’re going to find you. And when we do, I’m never letting go of you again._

 

* * *

 

An hour and 45 minutes into the stream, Mark starts to hallucinate. He doesn’t know if it’s due to the blood loss, or shock, or hunger, or the sheer exhaustion threatening to pull him under every ten minutes, but he starts seeing things in the shadowy corners of the cellar he knows aren’t there.

He sees Chica wagging her tail and bounding back and forth behind Taller’s chair. He sees his mom against the far wall, crying and reaching out for him. He sees his dad holding out a plate of fluffy pancakes for him, telling him it’ll get better soon, and he can’t help but break down at that.

Unfortunately, this only inspires Taller to walk over and press down on the towel covering his still-bleeding wound to shut him up. This has become their new favorite punishment for him — it’s why they took away the muscle stims after Quiet stabbed him. Mark supposes they must feel some sort of sick satisfaction knowing they have direct control over his pain, rather than having to rely on a device to hurt him.

They haven’t given him anything to read in about twenty minutes now, so Mark’s mostly been trying to stay awake and ignore the obvious signs of alcohol poisoning he’s starting to feel. His face is hot and his head is muddled, which he recognizes as the earliest indicators of his Problem. Thankfully he hasn’t had a drop of alcohol in about three years now, so it should take longer to build up in his system than it had during that week in Cincinnati when he’d had two or three beers every night for about a week.

Mark eventually earns another drink of water when the donations surpass $20,000, and he makes it last as long as he can. He’s still licking his lips when the digital clock over his left shoulder beeps, signaling the end of another hour. His heart skips and he whimpers, knowing what’s about to happen.

But instead, Taller just smirks and holds up a new set of cue cards while Quiet sterilizes a new syringe at the table in the far corner. Mark gulps, coughs, and starts to read.

“Thank you for the water. But I should have had more by now. You are still being selfish, a-and I am ashamed to h-have you as fans.” God, he hopes everyone watching can tell he doesn’t mean any of this. “Y-You are going to be punished by watching me get punished.

“You might see the clock behind me n-now says there are only four hours left in the stream. That means I’m d-due for another ethanol shot. Only this time, i-instead of half an ounce, my friend will — will inject a _f-full ounce_ into my hand, oh god … ”

Taller decides to use the taser this time in response to Mark’s script deviation, jabbing it into the slowly oozing cut running down Mark’s torso. Mark’s felt the shock so many times he doesn’t even scream, he just sobs and whines until it’s over.

When he can speak again, Mark continues with the cue card, fresh tears joining the stale ones already staining his cheeks: “Th-This is because my friend thinks the effects are t-taking too long to kick in. I-If you can’t see me suffer, what will drive you to give? Y-You are asking for this. Th-This is your fault. Enjoy the show and donate.”

Mark’s crying softly by the time Quiet rounds the chair and readies the needle. Taller appears to zoom the camera in on Mark’s hand again, and Quiet flips open the valve and injects the contents of the syringe into Mark’s bloodstream.

It burns worse this time because of the higher ethanol concentration, and Mark groans pathetically as he feels the concoction work its way up his arm. He’s five times dizzier within ten seconds, his vision going in and out of focus, and he feels his face heating up even more. Shit, this might be the moment he finally passes out.

Taller kicks him in the shin and jabs a finger at the blurry cue card he’s holding up. In the corner of the cellar, Chica is barking silently. Mark tries to catch his breath and focus on the words he’s supposed to read.

“I-If that looked p-painful to you, you’re right. It w-was.” He’s whispering, his words slurring, and he feels like he’s watching himself speak from across the room. “B-But it’s nothing c-comprised — _compared_ to what my friend end-dures every day from his c-cancer.”

Mark reads the rest of the cards without comprehending what they say. He thinks it’s more insults at the audience and facts about laryngeal cancer, but he really can’t be sure when his head feels like it’s underwater and his abdomen is on fire. He’s had his moments of depression and despair — hasn’t everyone? — but Mark doesn’t think he’s ever wished he was dead before now.

Finally, this set of cue cards ends. Taller reaches up to hit the mute button on the camera and Mark blinks up at him in a daze. He feels both terrified and prepared for whatever comes next, like a death row inmate approaching the electric chair.

“I think we’ve given you enough scripted words, Mark,” Taller muses, running his gloved fingers through Mark’s sweat-damp hair and pulling Mark’s head back. “Don’t think we can’t see the emptiness in your eyes. We can’t have you giving up on us yet. So for the next five minutes, we’ll let you rest. And after that, you’ll have five minutes to speak to your loved ones through the camera — no scripts.”

Mark’s eyes go wide, and his foggy brain clears a little. But before he can say anything, Taller continues. “There will still be rules, though. One: you can’t tell them anything about where you are, how you got here, or who brought you here. Two: no begging for them to rescue you, because as you already told them, that’s going to be close to impossible. And three: no being self-sacrificing and telling people to ‘stop donating to the evil kidnappers who want to kill me.’ If you disobey any of these rules, you get an extra ethanol shot and we might bring the knife out again for good measure. Got it?”

Mark nods quickly. Taller opens his mouth to say something else, but a resounding crash from the far table interrupts him. “Jesus. Mike, what the fuck did you break?” he mutters under his breath, stomping over to investigate the damage Quiet — Mike, apparently, holy _shit_ — has done.

Through the thick haze still clouding his pounding head, Mark knows he’s just gained a vital piece of information. A name. He has a _name_ to go off of now, holy _shit._ Now he just has to figure out a way to slip that into his unscripted message without being obvious.

“You better rest your eyes while you’ve got the chance, Mark,” Taller calls from the table. “You’ve only got four and a half minutes left.”

Mark leans his head back in the chair and closes his eyes, pretending to nod off — which, honestly, he wishes he could. Instead, he goes through word combinations and phrases in his head, hoping he can come up with a strategy in time.

 

* * *

 

It’s a little after 10 p.m. and Ethan’s running on nothing but adrenaline and a cup of shitty coffee from the hotel lobby. He, Tyler, Wade, and Bob are now at the FBI’s field office in Chelsea 20 minutes from the hotel — the agents had wanted to reconvene there and go over all the data they had, as well as see what new information they could collect from local law enforcement, and the four friends had insisted on following them. The agents, seeing the dedication on their faces (and the almost dangerous determination in the set of Bob’s shoulders), hadn’t put up much of a fight.

So that’s how Ethan ended up slumped against Tyler on a couch in an FBI conference room. He listens to the agents talking at the table and the soft conversation Wade is having with Mark’s mom on the phone and pulls his hoodie tighter around him. It’s one of Mark’s he happened to find in the hotel room before they left — soft and warm, a black Cloak prototype that’s just slightly too big for Ethan’s slim shoulders, but it smells like Mark’s cologne. Sighing, Ethan nuzzles into the collar and breathes in the scent for the millionth time since he put it on.

“Tell me again,” he murmurs, voice raggedy, and rests his head back on Tyler’s shoulder.

Tyler squeezes Ethan’s knee gently and whispers, “He’s gonna be okay.”

As if on cue, the agents at the table stop talking and turn on the projector in the middle of the table. “He’s about to talk again,” Agent O’Brynne says, pressing buttons on the projector and the laptop until the stream page is projected onto the whiteboard on the far wall. Seeing Mark’s exhausted, pained face blown up that large puts a rock in Ethan’s stomach, but he swallows and prepares himself for whatever he’s about to hear.

“Hey, guys,” Mark says, and it’s clear from the beginning that this is different than his other monologues. His voice is softer and less forced. “Um. Before I was reading c-cue cards from my — my friend, but. He said I could have five minutes to just talk to you. I guess he thinks it’ll keep me going or something.”

“Pay attention, everyone,” Agent Moore instructs the room. “This is unscripted. He might try to give us clues.” Already, someone appears to be recording the audio.

“So. First things first, I guess … I’m in a whole lot of pain. In case you couldn’t tell. I wanna tell you I’m okay and I’ll get out of this, b-but … it honestly doesn’t look that great from where I’m sitting.” Mark sniffles and blinks tears out of his reddened eyes, looking down at his lap for a moment as he gathers his composure. “I-I don’t know where I am, I don’t know if anyone else does, I — I don’t even know if you’d be able to f-find me if you tried. So. Just in case, I wanna take this time to s-say goodbye.”

The room is dead silent apart from the quiet whirring of the fan in the projector. Ethan shakes his head and covers his mouth with his hand, tears blurring Mark’s face. _This can’t be happening._

“Mom,” Mark says, looking like his heart is shattering, “I-I’m really sorry you had to see any of this. I l-love you so much and I w-want you to know how much I appreciate everything you did for me. Y-You’re the — the most amazing woman. T-Tom, you better take care of her. I love you too, b-but I swear I’ll haunt your ass if you don’t. I … I’ll t-try to say hi to d-dad for both of you.

“T-To all my friends … I don’t even know where to begin.” It’s clear Mark’s almost too choked up to speak at this point, and the same goes for nearly everyone in the conference room. “I-I guess I could say thank you for … making my life w-worth living. Thank you f-for believing in me when I didn’t believe in myself. Thank you for staying by my side through _everything._ Sean, Felix, Amy, Kathryn, Matt, Ryan, M-Matthias, I … I c-can’t articulate what you all mean to me. A-And I know there’s so many I’m forgetting, b-but my brain is barely working right now, so p-please forgive me. I love you all.

“A-And then there’s — there’s the guys I was at PAX East with this weekend. You’re my _brothers_. You’ve helped me make the b-best videos and have the best laughs I’ve ever h-had in my life. I-I’m running out of time, s-so I can only really t-talk to one of you, even though I wanna talk to all five of you — Bob, Michael, Wade, Ethan, and Tyler. I-I think it’s Ethan who kind of deserves an explanation, though.”

Ethan gasps and leans forward on the couch, damp eyes fixed on the screen. He can feel all eyes in the room train on him and sees the agents furiously taking notes, but the only thing he can see is Mark as the older man manages a tearful smile.

“I-I’m sorry I stood you up,” Mark says, somehow having the capacity to sound sheepish in his state. “I had the best night planned. I know y-you probably sat at that restaurant for an hour waiting for me, and I’m so sorry. I-If I’d been there, I’d’ve told you how proud I am of you. How glad I am that y-you didn’t bomb that first backflip. Y-You’ve come so far and you’ve made my channel better and you’ve made _me_ better and I-I … god.”

Mark takes a deep breath and looks down at his lap again, squeezing his eyes shut for a long moment. When he looks back up, the heartbreak is clear on his face. “I w-wanted to tell you this in person, but I don’t think I’m gonna get another chance, s-so … I love you.”

Ethan chokes out a half-scream, half-sob as his heart is pulverized to dust. Beside him, Tyler makes a pained sound.

“I-I have since the tour.” _Oh god oh god so long oh god_ “Th-Thinking about you is one of the only things that’s kept me sane in here. If by some m-miracle I get out of here, I promise I’ll try to be someone you d-deserve. If I don’t … take care of Chica and her brother for me. D-Don’t sell ‘er toys. She loves you too, s-so I know she’ll be happy with you.

“Fuck, I — I only have ten seconds left, guys. J-Just please know I love you all and even though this is a pretty shit ending to the story, I wouldn’t change any of it. I — just, thank you. I’ll m-miss you."

There’s a faint ding in the background of the video, like a timer going off, and Mark clamps his jaw tightly shut like an obedient animal. His eyes fill with trepidation and fear, but no gloved hands appear out of the darkness. It seems like they’re leaving him alone.

In the conference room, almost everyone is dabbing away tears. Wade, even though he appears to be on the verge of a breakdown, gets right to business. “He mentioned a Michael with him at PAX. We don’t know a Michael. Could that be a clue?”

“Absolutely.” Agent Henry writes that down. “We’ll cross-reference that with our list of cancer patients. Anything else?”

The room is silent for a few seconds until Ethan snaps himself out of his stunned haze. Even though it feels even more like his world is ending now, he needs to be helpful. “When he t-told me not to sell his dog Chica’s toys,” he says with a sniffle, “he pronounced ‘sell her’ kind of like ‘cellar.’ M-Maybe he’s in a cellar. And Chica doesn’t have a brother, either.”

“He emphasized ‘brothers’ at another point, as well,” Agent Moore chimes in. “Perhaps Michael is the cancer patient, and he abducted Mark with his brother and took him to a cellar.”

“There’s two Michaels on the patient list, and only one matches the height and estimated age of our suspect,” an unnamed agent announces from the table. He pulls up an image of a rather plain-looking, smiling white man on his tablet and shows it to the room. “Michael Strahm, thirty-four. This image is from his Facebook account. According to medical records, he was diagnosed with stage four throat cancer about eighteen months ago. Prognosis: not great. He’s also consulted with the hospital’s financial assistance department four times in the last six months.”

“Does he have a brother on Facebook?” Wade asks.

A pause. “Yes. David Strahm, thirty-eight.”

Ethan is getting antsy. He wants to get the fuck out of the depressing room, get in one of the shiny bulletproof Suburbans outside, turn on the sirens and go to Mark _right now._ “How far away do they live? Does it say on Facebook or — or the medical papers?”

“They both list Milford as their cities of residence on their social media profiles, which is almost an hour from here,” Agent Henry says, pulling up the accounts himself. _Milford? How ironic,_ thinks Ethan. “That appears to be verified by Michael Strahm’s medical file. We have his address.”

“Look it up on Street View, does the house have a cellar?” Bob asks, which is a fantastic idea. Agent O’Brynne brings up Google Maps on her laptop and plugs in the address, and everyone gathers around the table as it loads.

A few clicks later, the satellite imaging reveals that _yes,_ there’s a pair of cellar doors against the back of the Strahms’ house.

“We’ve got him,” Agent Henry says, and the room mobilizes.

Briefcases and backpacks are packed. Weapons are loaded and bulletproof vests are donned. Before he knows it, Ethan is running out to the parking lot behind Tyler and Wade towards a fleet of sleek black vehicles. His heart is racing and his mind is whirring with a tornado of different thoughts, most of them about the distance to Milford. If this town is almost an hour away, will they make it to Mark before something else dreadful happens to him? What if they get caught in traffic?

When they reach the fleet, Agent Henry turns to look at the four friends regretfully. “I’m sorry, but we can’t accommodate all of you,” he says as he tightens the straps of his vest. “At most, two of you can come along. We can bring the other two back to your hotel and we’ll send an agent with you to make sure you’re kept up-to-date.”

“I’m going,” Ethan declares immediately. “I — you can’t make me stay behind, I’ll ride in the fucking _trunk,_ strap me to the roof, I don’t care.”

“Tyler, you should go with him,” Wade says with a sad smile. Bob nods in agreement, and Ethan looks back in surprise. He hadn’t expected that to be so easy. “Really, we’ll be alright.”

Tyler hesitates for a few seconds, clearly not wanting any of them to be left behind. But at Agent Henry’s gentle insistence, he finally agrees and climbs with Ethan into the back of one of the Suburbans.

Ethan belts himself in and watches a SWAT team load themselves into an armored truck. Gulping, he asks Agent Henry in the driver’s seat, “I-Is SWAT really necessary for this?”

“The Strahms have proven themselves to be reckless, armed, and dangerous,” the agent replies, adjusting his rear-view mirror as Agent Moore sits beside him. “We have no idea what other weapons they might have in their arsenal. They might also try to barricade themselves in the cellar or hold Mark for ransom.” He flicks on the lights and the siren, and Ethan grips Tyler’s arm in a vice-like hold.

“Pull up the stream and let us know if anything else major happens,” Agent Moore tells them before grabbing her radio. “This is Agent Moore speaking for Case Agent Henry in Unit One. Prepare to mobilize. Local law enforcement in Milford has been instructed not to mobilize until we are five minutes out from the destination in order to protect the victim from further harm. This is a rescue operation and a potential hostage situation. Suspects are to be considered armed and dangerous. Estimated time to destination: fifty minutes.”

The rest of the fleet SUVs and sedans light up and turn on their sirens, and Agent Henry turns back to look at Ethan and Tyler. “Hold on,” he says with a grin.

Ethan barely has enough time to load the stream on his phone before the Suburban takes off like a bullet out of the parking lot, the rest of the fleet following. As he’s pressed back into the seat, he can only hope the sirens will help them shave a few minutes off their travel time.

_We’re coming, Mark. Just hold on for a little bit longer._

 

* * *

 

Mark howls as Taller turns up the strength of the muscle stims another notch. Apparently he and Mike — god, Mark sure hopes someone was able to understand his message — had gotten bored with aggravating his stab wound, so they’d decided to reintroduce an old favorite toy. Coupled with the latest ethanol shot from twenty minutes ago and a few taser shocks thrown in for fun, Mark is honestly shocked he’s still conscious.

“There’s less than th-three hours le-eft and we’ve only r-raised thirty-seven thousand dollars,” he reads from a cue card, choking out each word on the end of a pained gasp. “A-All of you should be ashamed of y-yourselves. How d-dare you do this to m-me and to my friend. I h-hope you all get cancer and find out j-just how miserable it is.”

The cue cards are becoming meaner and darker, and Mark tastes bile in his throat whenever he reads them. But even more alarmingly, his left arm and the left side of his face is starting to tingle in a familiar way. He can feel his heart beating faster and harder to try and keep enough blood flowing to his brain, but he knows in less than an hour it’ll stop being able to keep up. Already, the room is spinning so much he can barely read the cards two feet from his face. The poison has built up enough to actually start manifesting the heart-attack-slash-stroke symptoms, and Mark knows he doesn’t have a lot of time left.

Suddenly, as though from a dream, Mark hears what he thinks could be sirens. A _lot_ of them. Given his recent tendency towards hallucinations, however, he doesn’t pay them any attention.

But Mike and Taller stiffen and share a look. Taller turns off the stims and sets the controller on the small table beside Mark’s chair. He walks over to the wooden staircase, pausing to listen. Mark blinks in wonder. _Can they hear it, too? Is it real?_

The sirens get louder and louder, and the ground above their heads starts to shake with the approach of dozens of vehicles. Mark lets out a disbelieving sob and his eyes well up with relief when he realizes he might actually get out of this alive. They — whoever is up there, thundering towards his prison — understood him.

Taller hears Mark’s excited sound and shouts with rage, storming over to him and grabbing the knife off the table. “Mike, kill the stream!” he orders his brother, who obeys immediately.

Holding the knife to Mark’s neck, Taller demands in a dangerously low voice, “How did you do this?” His eyes are alight with fury, drilling into Mark’s like lasers.

Mark just meets his eyes and shakes his head. “I-I didn’t do anything,” he says as sincerely as he can. “Do you honestly think I have the mental power right now to orchestrate an escape? All I did was sit here and scream for you. The two of you m-must’ve fucked up somewhere and done this to yourselves.”

_“FBI and Police! You are surrounded and outnumbered! Come out with your hands up!”_

“You piece of _shit!”_ Taller reaches down and rips the towel bandage away from Mark’s stab wound. With a sneer, he plunges the knife back into it, twisting savagely. Mark screams so hard he tastes iron in the back of his throat. “Tell me what you told them!”

“I — I d-didn’t say — anything!” Mark cries, convulsing and wailing when Taller twists the knife further. Blood gushes down his side, staining his shirt, his jeans, and the chair even further. “Y-You watched me t-talk! G-God, I — I swear! Please!”

Taller stares at Mark’s anguished face for a few more agonizing seconds before apparently deciding to believe him. With one final jab, he removes the knife from Mark’s side and haphazardly replaces the towel. “Mike, get the gun.”

Mark is barely conscious enough to feel the pang of panic at that sentence. They’d had a _gun_ down here the whole time? Were they saving it for a situation like this? He doesn’t have much time to ponder that before Taller removes the electrodes from his chest and begins — strangely — untying the ropes around his raw wrists and ankles.

“You’re gonna cooperate, you lying fuck,” the man growls in Mark’s ear, “or next time that blade is gonna slice your jugular wide open.”

Before he knows what’s happening, Mark is being pulled out of the chair and forced to stand. With the gaping wound in his side, his overworked heart, and half his body getting weaker by the minute, he can barely hold his own weight. He wraps one arm around himself to hold the towel in place as Taller slings his other, numb arm over his shoulders. Every tiny stretch and movement hurts. The thought crosses Mark’s mind to run, but when Mike hands Taller a freshly-loaded pistol, he thinks better of it.

Achingly slowly, Taller half-helps, half-drags Mark up the cellar staircase. Mark whimpers with every step, but eventually they make it to the top and Taller shoves the doors open, attracting a spotlight. The sirens are deafening now.

 _“David and Michael Strahm! Come out slowly and with your hands up!”_ says the same amplified voice from before. _“We have you surrounded!”_

“Time to cooperate,” Taller — David — mutters darkly in Mark’s ear. He cocks the gun, presses it to Mark’s temple, and they step out into the cool night air.

 

* * *

 

Ethan’s only ever seen FBI standoffs in movies and re-runs of _Castle_ and _NUMB3RS_ episodes. He never imagined in a million years he’d ever witness one in real life, or that he’d have a personal stake in the outcome.

He and Tyler are instructed to wait in Agent Henry’s Suburban until things are “resolved,” whatever that means. From where they’re parked, Ethan can just see the cellar doors around the back corner of the house. He has no idea what’s happening to Mark right now, since the stream was cut as they were pulling up, but he hopes to God they didn’t hurt him for getting them caught. Yes, the two clues Mark gave investigators were helpful, but most of the information they had to work with was provided — albeit inadvertently — by the Strahms themselves.

Ethan can barely hear Agent Henry’s demand for the brothers to come out with their hands up over the sounds of the sirens. Thankfully, this house is a significant distance from any others, so they had room to park the multitude of squad cars, ambulances, and Bureau vehicles in a complete circle around the property.

“Why aren’t they coming out?” Ethan says, still gripping Tyler’s arm as he had the whole ride over here. “What if they’re not in there?”

“One of the officers said the van is parked behind the house,” Tyler says. “They’re down there.”

“Then what’s taking them so long?” Ethan bounces his right leg up and down and stares hard at the cellar doors, wishing he could open them just by thinking hard enough. “What if they’re hurting him?”

Tyler just sighs and scrubs a hand down his face anxiously. “If they don’t come out themselves, that’s when SWAT will go in. It’s gonna be okay.”

As if on cue, the cellar doors suddenly fly open. A spotlight from the roof of the SWAT truck immediately focuses there, and Ethan holds his breath. Beside him, Tyler goes completely tense.

Slowly, two figures emerge from the cellar. One is a man dressed completely in black, his face mostly covered by a ski mask. The other is a bloodied, battered, half-conscious Mark.

Tyler gasps and Ethan chokes out a shocked noise as he takes in the image: Most of Mark’s weight is being supported by his captor, who has a gun pressed to Mark’s temple and is looking around at the agents and officers manically. Mark is trying to hold the towel against his side to stem the flow of blood from his most serious injury, but from what Ethan can make out, it’s still flowing freely down to his knee, staining his jeans. His dirty flannel shirt is still unbuttoned, revealing a slew of burns, bruises, scratches, and cuts on his chest and stomach. And his _face_ … His face is flushed and afraid, but also desperately hopeful.

“Mark,” Ethan whispers, holding himself back from bursting out of the car and running to him. “Oh god, Tyler, he’s right there.”

“He’s gonna be fine,” Tyler says, but it sounds like he’s talking mostly to himself.

 _“Drop the weapon and put your hands up!”_ says Agent Henry through the speaker system. _“You are outnumbered and completely surrounded! Drop the weapon and release the hostage or we will shoot!”_

“Listen to him, listen to him,” Ethan mutters, watching with rapt attention. “Give up, you piece of shit.”

_“It’s over, David! Drop the weapon now!”_

The captor — David — says something Ethan can’t hear from this distance. Ethan can see his arm tense, though, like he’s about to pull the trigger. Mark’s eyes squeeze shut, and Ethan feels sick.

Just then, a third figure emerges from the cellar — Michael, Ethan guesses. His hands are empty and above his head, and he appears willing to cooperate. When his brother notices this, he turns and shouts something to him, momentarily distracted.

Mark must see this as an opportunity. In a mind-boggling show of strength considering his injuries, he quickly removes his left arm from around David’s shoulders and elbows him in the stomach as hard as he can. The gun lands in the grass. Ethan watches in stunned silence as Mark then grabs his captor by the throat with his right hand, squeezes, and slams him down to the ground, pinning him there as armed personnel swarm around him to take over.

“Holy shit,” Tyler breathes, fumbling with the door handle. “Holy fucking shit.”

Ethan can’t speak. He just scrambles out of the SUV beside Tyler and shoves his way through the crowd of armed cops and agents to get to the front. _Must get to Mark must see Mark_

Finally, Ethan breaks free of the throng and sprints to the team of paramedics who are helping Mark walk to a nearby stretcher. “Mark!”

The injured man pauses and turns his head, his non-swollen eye widening in confused shock. “Ethan?”

Ethan sobs and runs to him, waiting for the medics to lift him onto the stretcher before reaching over and cupping Mark’s mottled face in his hands. “Mark, _Mark,_ oh my g-god, I’m here, I found you, we f-found you —”

“Ethan,” Mark breathes, staring up at him in awe. He weakly grasps one of Ethan’s wrists and blinks once. “I love you.”

Ethan laughs wetly and nods. “I love you too,” he says, walking with the stretcher as it begins to move towards the waiting ambulance. “Fuck, th-this is _not_ how I wanted to tell you, though.” The medics are attaching ECG patches to Mark’s chest and talking all around them, but he doesn’t hear a word they say.

“‘M sorry,” Mark says, managing a tiny, goofy smile. It fades a moment later, though, and Ethan watches in horror as Mark’s eyes roll back in his head and the ECG screen at the foot of the stretcher goes haywire.

“Sir, step back now,” one of the medics instructs quickly, and Ethan reluctantly obeys. He backs right into Tyler, who has apparently been right behind him the whole time. “TIA!”

“Fuckfuckfuck,” Ethan whispers to himself as he watches the medics attach more cables to Mark and replace his slap-dash amateur IV with a real one. Tyler grasps Ethan’s shoulder as they remove the towel to reveal the stab wound, and Ethan actually gags at the sight. Thankfully, the medics start cleaning it and patching it up immediately.

When the medics finally determine it’s safe to lift Mark into the back of the ambulance, Ethan shares a look with Tyler before pushing forwards. “I’m coming with him.

One of the medics eyes him up and down for a moment. She seems to recognize the scrappy determined look in his eyes for what it is, so she sighs and waves him up. “Fine. But we need space to work on him.”

Ethan nods and steps up into the ambulance. He turns back to Tyler for a few seconds before sitting down. “Follow us with Agent Henry. I’ll see you at the hospital, okay?”

Tyler nods. “Okay. Take care of him.”

Ethan just bites his lip, hoping he’ll be able to. He watches as Tyler runs back to Agent Henry, then settles back on the bench in the ambulance. The medics get to work quite fast and surround Mark almost entirely, but Ethan’s still able to slip his arm between them and take Mark’s limp hand in his.

“I’m right here, Mark,” he says, hoping his words somehow reach the other man. “I’m not going anywhere. And neither are you.”

 

* * *

 

The world is hazy and too-bright when Mark’s tired eyes slowly flutter open. He blinks a few times to get his vision to focus as much as possible, curling his fingers in the starchy bedsheets wrapped around his lower half. Okay, so he’s lying in a bed. That’s good information.

As the space around him comes more into focus, Mark recognizes it immediately as a hospital room. To his right, he sees a heart monitor and an IV drip with three bags feeding fluids into his arm.

_Did I really make it out of there?_

Mark gulps as he looks down at his torso. He’s wearing a hospital gown backwards — probably for easier access to the swathes of gauze and bandages covering his chest and stomach — but when he shifts his hips just a bit, he can feel he’s wearing boxers. _Thank fuck._

Oh. And a catheter. _Great._

Oddly, Mark realizes after a moment he can’t feel any pain. One of the IV bags must be morphine. Maybe that’s contributing to the brain fog he can’t seem to shake.

He’s about to close his eyes and try to drift back off to sleep when he hears a soft snuffling sound coming from the left side of his bed. Dazedly, Mark turns to find Ethan slumped over the edge of the bed with his head pillowed on his arms, fast asleep. _Ethan …_ Did he see Mark’s message to him during the stream? Are the feelings reciprocated?

Mark’s heart aches. With all the strength he can muster, he slowly lifts his hand and runs his trembling fingers through Ethan’s soft chestnut hair.

The younger man snorts and snaps awake instantly, making Mark’s hand flop back onto the mattress. He blinks twice, turns to look at Mark, and jolts like he’s been electrocuted when he meets Mark’s open eyes. “Hey,” he says, voice trembling as he scrambles to grab Mark’s hand. “H-Hey, oh my god.”

Seeing those blue eyes this close after what feels like months is like jumping into the ocean on the hottest day of the year. “Hi,” Mark replies, mildly alarmed at how hoarse his own voice is. He manages to give Ethan’s hand a weak squeeze. “I … I think I’m awake.”

Ethan laughs in disbelief and Mark watches a single tear trail down his cheek. “I think you are too, bud,” he says with a sniffle. “Do you need anything? Water, an ice pack? Fuck, I should call the nurse.” He looks around frantically for a few seconds until he locates the call button on the side of Mark’s bed. “She’ll be here any minute.”

“Okay.” Mark swallows hard and winces. “Is there any water in here?”

“Yeah, of course, one sec —” Ethan lets go of Mark’s hand and stands up to walk to the sink across the room. Mark immediately feels cold, and he shivers a bit while he watches Ethan fill up a plastic cup with tap water.

“Thank you,” he murmurs when Ethan returns to his bedside, accepting the cup eagerly. He sucks down the water and sighs as it soothes the grittiness of his throat.

“Um, Tyler and Wade and Bob are back at the hotel,” Ethan starts to explain as Mark finishes his drink. “They came in to see you when you were still asleep, but there was nowhere for them to stay here so I’ve been keeping them updated. I — I kinda told the nurses and doctors they couldn’t get me to leave without sedating me, so they’ve mostly left me alone.”

Mark huffs out a laugh and shakes his head. “‘S okay. I’m glad you’re here, but you need rest too.”

Ethan just waves him off and continues. “Whatever. Oh, and Tom and your mom flew in the morning after we found you. They’re actually eating lunch on the lower level right now, I think.”

 _Morning after?_ Mark blinks in confusion, his heart starting to race a little. “How long have I been here?”

“Three days.” Ethan looks down at their joined hands and laces their fingers together, tracing the bandages on Mark’s rope-burned wrist. “Y-You passed out in the ambulance and … this is the first time you’ve been awake since. They kept you sedated for the first day, though. You were … it d-didn’t look good for a few hours.”

Mark squeezes Ethan’s hand and opens his mouth to offer some reassurance, but he’s interrupted by the arrival of a kind-faced, middle-aged nurse holding a clipboard. “Hello, Mark,” she says with a smile, striding over to his bedside and meeting his eyes. “I’m Amy, I’ll be your nurse for this afternoon. It’s good to see you awake. How are you feeling?”

Mark thinks long and hard before answering, wanting to be honest. “Weird,” he says finally. “Um. Nothing hurts, but my head’s all swimmy and I don’t know what day it is or where I am and —”

“Hey, shh, it’s okay,” Amy says, and Ethan echoes her. “You’re at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. It’s Thursday, April twelve. And your head’s probably ‘swimmy’ from the awesome cocktail of painkillers and antibiotics we’ve got you hooked up to right now. I’m glad nothing hurts, though.” She carefully wraps a blood pressure cuff around his right bicep and starts pumping. “Do you remember how you got here?”

Mark shakes his head, looking from her to Ethan and back. “I-I don’t know how anyone found me,” he says, trying his hardest to think back to the cellar. “I tried to give them clues, but I know it wasn’t enough.”

“Your clues were the most helpful ones,” Ethan says, gently turning Mark’s head back to face him. “We were able to find their van on security cameras, but without you giving us a name, we would’ve had to rely on spotty traffic cameras to track you down. And then you took the fucking guy down with two hits while you were having a heart attack and _bleeding from a stab wound,_ on top of everything. So don’t you _dare_ say you didn’t do enough.”

Mark’s eyes are bugging out of his head as Amy removes the blood pressure cuff. “I did _what?"_ It must've been a desperate, adrenaline-fueled final escape attempt.

“I think your friends will be able to fill you in on the story later,” Amy says, writing something down on her clipboard. “What you should know right now is this: You did suffer a deep stab wound to your lower left side, which we’ve since cleaned and bandaged. Luckily, there was no damage to any internal organs, so surgery wasn’t necessary. Because you lost so much blood from the injury, however, you did have a small transfusion when you arrived at the hospital three days ago. Additionally, while you suffered a TIA due to your body being unable to break down the ethanol you were injected with, your heart and liver seem to be recovering well from it. The rest of your injuries are surface-level, apart from the cut in your chest which required forty stitches and some tearing in your pectoral and abdominal muscles.”

Mark nods along with each new piece of information, though he doesn’t fully comprehend any of it. He mostly tries to focus on the soothing rhythm of Ethan’s thumb rubbing the back of his hand, keeping him from spiraling. When the nurse is finished with her run-down, Mark asks, “How long am I going to be here?”

Amy flips through the papers on her clipboard. “I think Dr. Myers wants to keep you here at least another four days, but I’ll ask him for you. He should be in to speak with you in the next hour or two, as well.”

After answering a couple more of Ethan and Mark’s questions, Amy smiles and turns to leave. Before she makes it out the door, Mark can’t help but say, “I like your name, by the way.”

Amy sends him a smile over her shoulder. “You’re too sweet,” she says, then breezes out the door.

Another three seconds and Mark groans, slapping his free hand over his face as something else occurs to him. “Oh my god, has anyone notified the fans about this?” he asks. “They might think I’m fucking _dead,_ holy shit, where’s my phone — ?”

“Mark, _Mark,_ slow down,” Ethan soothes, reaching up and sifting his fingers through Mark’s greasy hair. “We’ve all sent tweets out to let the community know you’re okay. We even made a quick video to answer some questions people had. Right now you need to focus on recovering and, honestly, just forget about YouTube for awhile. Okay?”

Mark breathes hard and looks into Ethan’s steady blue eyes for solace. He calms down after a minute and nods, relaxing back against the pillow beneath his head. “Okay.”

It’s quiet in the room for a couple minutes after that, the only sounds being Mark’s breathing and the steady beep of the heart monitor. Mark thinks he’s about to drift off to sleep again when Ethan murmurs, “S-So you really don’t remember us rescuing you? All the cars and sirens?”

“No.” Mark thinks back as far as he can. “I think … I remember the third ethanol shot, and then getting hooked up to the stims again, but after that … nothing but fog.” He looks over at Ethan curiously. “Why?”

Ethan bites his lip and shrugs one shoulder, looking down at their hands again. “I-I, um. I watched your message to me during the stream,” he says shyly, and the heart monitor starts beeping a little faster. “And when we found you, I … I told you I felt the same.”

It’s like the room and the medical paraphernalia fade away, and the only things left in the world are Ethan and Mark. Eyes wide and heart pounding, Mark whispers, “Y-You did?”

Ethan meets Mark’s hopeful gaze and nods, squeezing his hand and smiling. “Yeah. Worst timing ever, I know.”

Mark shakes his head, sits up a bit, and disentangles his fingers from Ethan’s. Gently, he winds them in the soft hairs at the back of Ethan’s neck and pulls him closer until their foreheads are touching and their noses are centimeters apart. He relishes in the surprised intake of breath he hears from Ethan at the closeness.

“I’d kiss you,” Mark whispers, and Ethan’s riptide eyes flash. “But I haven’t brushed my teeth in four days and I’m afraid the morphine will make me forget.”

“It’s okay,” Ethan breathes, caressing the unbruised side of Mark’s face and licking his own lips. “I-I’ve waited this long.”

Mark nods and reaches up to take Ethan’s hand again, kissing his knuckles. Ethan sighs and closes his eyes. “You should go back to sleep, Mark,” he says, but he makes no move to pull away.

“Only if you climb up here next to me.”

After some half-hearted protests and slow sideways shifting, Ethan ends up wedged next to Mark on the hospital bed, draped in the thin spare blanket from the cabinet across the room. Mark can tell he’s terrified to cause any pain, but he figures if they just stay side-by-side like this, it’ll work.

Mark links his left hand with Ethan’s right and rests his head on the younger man’s shoulder as he closes his eyes. “Love you,” he whispers, already slurring a little.

He’s barely awake long enough to hear Ethan say it back.

 

* * *

 

Mark ends up spending five more days in the hospital, just to make sure the wound in his side is healing without complications. The doctor also orders an MRI to evaluate the extent of the muscle tears in Mark’s chest and abs — luckily, they don’t appear severe enough to warrant surgery. With rest and plenty of ice and anti-inflammatories, they should heal just fine in a few weeks. Additionally, he's extremely happy to learn that every cent that was donated during the stream will be returned to the donors after investigations conclude.

Mark has his mom in the room for a lot of the update and treatment conversations just because she tends to fret when she doesn’t know what’s going on with him, but Ethan is there for all of them. He and Mark become attached at the wrist, inseparable apart from bathroom breaks and when Ethan heads back to the hotel to shower. Oh, and also when a nurse had to take Mark’s catheter out. He didn’t want _anyone_ in the room for that mortifying experience.

By day eight, Mark is able to move around a bit better, feed himself, brush his teeth, and even walk to and from the bathroom by himself. The doctor and nurses declare him fit for discharge, but not for travel for another ten days, which makes Mark a bit anxious. The hotel they’re staying at isn’t exactly cheap, and he doesn’t want the mounting costs to overwhelm his friends.

“That’s actually not an issue,” Tyler tells him when he voices this concern as he and Ethan help him get dressed in normal clothes. “PAX knows about what happened, and they’re paying for the rest of our stay in Boston.”

“What?” Mark looks at Ethan for confirmation, and when the younger man nods, he groans and runs a hand through his hair. “Oh, they didn’t have to do that. I gotta let them know I’ll find a way to pay them back.”

“Let them help you, you silly boy,” Mark’s mom says from the bed, where she’s going through his plastic bag of belongings. It includes his watch, his phone, the broken remnants of his glasses that must’ve been recovered from the cellar, and plenty of gauze and bandaging to dress his wound himself. “People are going to be nice to you after this, and you need to let them.”

Mark rolls his eyes but says nothing. A moment later, that train of thought is derailed anyway when Ethan appears in front of him and starts buttoning up his shirt. Smirking, Mark grabs his hands and bends down slightly to meet his eyes. “I can do this part myself, y’know,” he says, voice low. “I buttoned my jeans.”

“Yeah, well.” Ethan gently extracts his fingers from Mark’s grip and continues his task. “I wanted to help.” There’s a content smile on his face as he works that makes Mark’s heart skip a beat or two.

“Make sure you line ‘em up right, then,” Mark murmurs. After a brief hesitation, he brings his hands up to rest on Ethan’s slim hips. Ethan doesn’t even pause before taking a half-step closer.

“You two are dis _-gus-_ ting,” Tyler chuckles, standing up when he finishes tying Mark’s shoes. Mark smiles as he watches a pink blush spread over Ethan’s nose and cheeks. “Alright, big boy, time to get in the wheelchair.”

“I really think it’s unnecessary,” Mark declares even as he reluctantly walks over to it. “I could make it on my own if we went super slow and avoided staircases. And inclines.”

“Get in the chair or I’ll put you in it,” his mom says, leveling him with an even stare. Mark knows better than to argue with that look.

Tyler wheels Mark out with Ethan and his mom following. They check him out at the discharge desk, then head out to the exit where Bob and Wade are waiting with two rental cars — which Mark immediately insists on paying for for as long as they’re in Boston, despite loud protests from everyone else. He slowly climbs into the back seat of Wade’s Nissan with Ethan’s help, and after some maneuvering, he’s belted in.

“How’re you feeling today?” Wade asks as he pulls out of the lot, meeting Mark’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. Surprisingly, he’s been quite the mother hen type throughout this whole ordeal, almost more so than Mark’s actual mother.

Mark sighs and relaxes back into the seat, tangling his fingers with Ethan’s and closing his eyes. “I’m just glad to finally get out of that place,” he says after a few seconds. “I wanna sleep in a real bed without being woken up every two hours for a vitals check. Everyone there was so nice but _god,_ I hate hospitals.”

Mark hasn’t mentioned to anyone the other problem keeping him from sleeping for the last few days: nightmares. Vivid ones he can hear and feel so clearly. He’s startled awake a couple times thinking he’s back in that cellar, tied to a chair with a psychopath twisting a knife in his side. He’d known this experience would fuck him up, and he’s planning on getting professional help once he’s back home in L.A., but for now … he doesn’t think anyone needs to know.

Well. He might tell Ethan and his mom. But besides that, it’ll come up when it comes up.

“Does anything hurt?” Ethan asks, rubbing Mark’s knuckles in that hypnotizing rhythm he’s perfected. “I think your meds are in the other car with your mom.”

Mark shakes his head and turns to look at Ethan, smiling contentedly. “I’m fine for now, thanks,” he says, squeezing the younger man’s hand. “I’ve got everything I need right here.”

“You’re a fucking … cheese ball.”

“But I’m _your_ cheese ball.”

“God, why did I agree to drive the new couple?” Wade asks, feigning exasperation as he makes a right turn. “You two are cute ‘n all, but you’re gonna give me cavities if you keep it up.”

“That sounds like a challenge. Does that sound like a challenge to you, Ethan?”

“Oh, absolutely. The ‘Give Wade Cavities From Our Sweet Love’ challenge.”

“‘Markiplier Makes: Wade Drive Off The Road.”

“‘Markiplier Re-Enacts Fanfic In Front Of Wade And — ”

“Alright, _alright!”_ Wade’s cracking up by now, wheezing with laughter. “Jesus. You two were bad before, but now you’re gonna be worse, aren’t you?”

“Youuu betcha!” Mark giggles, leaning over to kiss Ethan’s pink cheek. He stretches a bit too far, though, and can’t hide the quick pained gasp he lets out when his side twinges. Wade and Ethan immediately inundate him with questions and “Are you okay”s, which is appreciated but unnecessary. Mark waves them off with a tight smile, assuring them he’s fine.

If he lets himself think too much about his recovery timeline, Mark gets a little overwhelmed. He knows the cuts and burns on his chest won’t take terribly long to heal, but it’ll probably be months before he can move freely without the gash in his side aching. And even after the physical injuries turn to scars, the mental injuries from all this definitely won’t go away in a few weeks. Hell, it might take _years_ before Mark can go in his basement with the lights off, or sit in a creaky wooden chair, without horrific memories flooding into his mind.

Besides all that, he’s also got a new boyfriend. He’d like to be able to … do _things_ with his boyfriend sooner rather than later, but since there’s a gaping hole in his side and bandages all over his torso, that’s pretty much going to be impossible for awhile.

But he doesn’t want to think about that now. As Wade turns into the hotel lot and pulls up outside the front entrance, Mark gives himself a mental shakedown and unbuckles his seatbelt. He waits for Ethan to appear at his door before he opens it, taking his offered hands gratefully and pulling himself out of the car with a few grunts. “I don’t think riding in cars is good for me yet,” he mutters as he pretty much falls forwards into Ethan’s arms.

“I’m gonna go park and call Bob,” Wade says from the front seat before Mark closes the door. “He must be stuck in traffic. Just head up to the room, we’ll meet you there.”

“No problem,” Mark says while he straightens himself up, still leaning on Ethan a little. “See you in a minute.”

As he and Ethan walk slowly through the lobby towards the elevators, Mark’s mind starts concocting a Plan. He wonders if he can initiate this Plan in the elevator, but he doesn’t want to rush it or risk being interrupted. The Plan might work in the hallway outside the room, but again, the risk of interruption is still too great. Perhaps he could initiate the Plan when he —

Suddenly, Mark is tugged sideways — away from the nearing elevator doors. He looks at Ethan in befuddlement, studying the determined look on the younger man’s face. “Dude, the elevators are right there. What the hell are you —”

“Just … hush for a second.” Ethan stalks over to a nearby stairwell that doesn’t seem to get a lot of traffic, gently pulling Mark behind him.

“I can’t do stairs, man, especially not _twelve flights.”_

“I said hush!”

And then they’re in the stairwell, alone, with nothing but a flickering fluorescent light shining on them. The lighting makes Mark’s stomach clench unpleasantly, but he’s distracted by the way Ethan drags him to a far corner of the landing and boxes him in against the wall.

 _Oh._ Mark may not need to implement his Plan after all. “Can I help you?” he hears himself ask. _Smooth as gravel._

Ethan stares into Mark’s eyes and flicks the tip of his tongue out to wet his lips, blushing a little. “I’ve wanted to kiss you since before I knew your name,” he admits, voice low and quiet. Just for Mark’s ears. “When I found out your name, it only made it worse because it meant you were a person instead of just a concept. And meeting you — becoming one of your best friends — made it _even fucking worse,_ because I realized you weren’t the person I thought you were from your videos. You were better. More. _Real._ A-And when I thought I’d watched you die … all I wanted to do was find you and tell you how I felt and _finally_ rip off this giant band-aid that’s been glued to my heart for years. S-So. Now that you’re not about to die and you don’t smell like a mildewy basement …”

Breathing out, Ethan rests his forehead against Mark’s and just looks at him, asking a question without words. Mark, as stunned and moved as he is by that speech, only knows one way to respond. He reaches up, fists his hands in Ethan’s Henley, and pulls him in.

And. The feeling of their lips finally meeting after months of Mark imagining it and a week of Mark _vividly_ imagining it … it’s more electric than any shock he’d taken in that cellar. This shock isn’t painful, though — it makes every cell in his body sing. All he wants is to keep it from ending, so he wraps an arm around Ethan’s waist and pulls him closer, tilting his head to deepen the already urgent kiss. Ethan responds beautifully, looping his arms around Mark’s neck and parting his lips in an invitation. Mark gladly accepts and his knees almost give out at the feeling of his tongue brushing Ethan’s, accidentally at first and then very, _very_ deliberately. He can’t believe this is happening, and from the desperate, needy way he’s kissing Mark and clinging to him, Ethan can’t either. _God,_ but Ethan’s a good kisser.

“Love you,” Ethan gasps during their short breaks for air, tangling his fingers in Mark’s hair. “Loveyouloveyouloveyou.”

“I love you too,” Mark rumbles. He nips at Ethan’s lips and pulls him closer, pressing their chests together. “I love — _ah!”_

In his desperation, Mark had completely forgotten about his injuries. Pulling Ethan completely against him, while it should have felt warm and right and heavenly, instead only pressed on his bandages and his swollen muscles. Cursing himself, Mark groans in frustration and rests his forehead on Ethan’s shoulder as his grip loosens. “Fuck. I _hate_ this.”

“I know,” Ethan soothes, running a hand up and down Mark’s right side. “I do too. But I’m not gonna let you hurt yourself because you wanna hug me, no matter how much I wanna hug you too.”

Mark hums and nips at Ethan’s neck, nuzzling at a spot just under his ear that makes the younger man’s breath hitch. “The thing is,” he says, voice deep and syrupy, “I wanna do so much more than hug you.”

Ethan downright _shudders_ at that, but he shakes his head resolutely. “F-Fuck, I — I want that too,” he says, resting their foreheads together and looking into Mark’s dark eyes. “But. It’s just gonna have to wait. You have a _stab wound,_ Mark.”

“Meh. Stab wound, boner. Which one is more important?” Mark marches kisses up the line of Ethan’s jaw until he reaches his ear, where he stops to bite his lip. Another thought’s just occurred to him, and he can’t help but feel a pang of anxiety about it. “I …” For some reason he can’t get the thought out, so he just wraps his arms around Ethan’s waist and hides his face in his neck with his eyes squeezed shut.

Ethan seems to pick up on the mood change, and he gently hugs Mark around the shoulders. “What’s wrong?” he murmurs, pressing a kiss into Mark’s hair.

Mark shakes his head and sighs almost angrily, swallowing back the lump in his throat he _didn’t ask for._ “When I’m all healed up,” he says, voice small and shy, “I-I … I’m gonna be _covered_ in scars. I already had a few and I eventually learned to ignore them, b-but these — I mean, th-there’s cuts and burns all over my chest and the thing in my side is gonna be huge and _gross_ and I just …”

He sniffles and hopes Ethan can’t feel the few tears that leak out onto his neck. “ … I-I just wish I could give you a better version of me. My brain is all scrambled now and I wish I … looked better for you. B-But instead you get this traumatized, torn-up person and I-I’m sorry.”

Ethan just holds Mark for a couple minutes while the older man gets himself together. Mark clings to him as tight as he dares and tries to even out his breathing by matching it with Ethan’s, which eventually works.

“If you think,” Ethan finally says, his lips brushing the shell of Mark’s ear, “that I’d _ever_ think you’re ugly or undesirable for _any_ reason, you’re out of your fucking mind. I didn’t fall for a specific ‘version’ of you, idiot; I fell for _you._ You’re the most gorgeous person I’ve ever seen and you’re brave and selfless and kind and _nothing_ — especially not trauma or something fucking superficial like a few scars — is gonna change my mind.”

Mark pulls back to look into Ethan’s lovestruck eyes, trying to determine if he sees any evidence of deception there. When he finds none, his own eyes overflow and he reaches up to cup the side of Ethan’s face in a shaking hand.

Even now, though, Mark can’t resist the chance to make a joke. “N-Not even my tendency to generally be an asshole all the time?” he asks with a watery grin, ignoring the tears now trickling down his cheeks.

Ethan just laughs and shakes his head. “Dude, I’m used to that by now. And it hasn’t made me love you any less yet.”

Mark sobs once. “What did I do to deserve you?” he breathes, nuzzling Ethan’s nose with his own. “Kiss me again.”

Without a word, Ethan does just that. And even though Mark has months of recovery ahead of him, he knows he’ll be able to get through it as long as Ethan never lets go of him.

  
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**Author's Note:**

> if anyone would like a second part with some of mark's recovery and maybe some ~fun times~ between him and the blue boi, let me know :)


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